Below is an interactive programme for OER15. Registering an account will let you follow and discuss sessions as well as building your personal conference calendar. A printable version of the programme timetable can be viewed in a new window or downloaded as a PDF document (this includes session abstracts).
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KEYNOTE: Cable Green Tue, Apr 14 2015, 10:50am – 11:30am Download Cable Green Keynote Slidesmore |
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Open Education and the Broader Open Policy Environment [780] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Governments and education instutions around the world generate huge amounts of publicly funded research, data, and educational materials. Open policies, or policies that require open licenses for publicity funded resources, can maximize the impact of public investments and support open education by enabling the use and re-use of these valuable resources. Join members of the Open Policy Network (OPN) — a newly launched coalition of organizations and individuals working to support the creation, adoption, and implementation of open policies across the world — for a discussion about some of the latest trends in open policy and how it relates to...more Finding and Making Xerte Learning Objects for Research Methods [670] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Understanding research methodologies and methods is very important formany learners, particularly those who are undertaking study at Level 7 orabove. It is also an area with which students may be unfamiliar, and in whichthey appreciate opportunities for practice. For part-time and distancelearners, and those who are predominantly work-based, it is particularlyimportant that appropriate, engaging resources in the topic are made availableonline, for example via an institutional VLE such as Moodle. Given the numericaland graphical aspects covered, producing effective resources can be difficultand time-consuming, and hence good quality, ready-made materials were sought.An inspection of the OER repository XPERT revealed several appropriate...more Towards understanding the impact on teaching practices of ‘OERs as MOOCs and MOOCs as OER’ at an African University [713] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm This project arose as a result of a call from the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) programme to submit research proposals on the theme “Impact of OER in the developing regions of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa”. The University of Cape Town (UCT) will launch its first phase of locally-created MOOCs in early 2015. Each individual MOOC has its own strategic goals that, to varying degrees, include the provision of open educational opportunities to engage participants in locally generated knowledge. The academic leads are committed in principle to producing their MOOCs as Open Educational Resources (OER), with the...more A MOOC in a month [688] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm This Lightning talk will share the experience of developing an open, online event based learning experience between June and July 2014. From few notes scribbled onto an A4 sheet of paper to, in under one month, to being the first university in the world to go live with the Blackboard Open Education Platform, was a roller coaster ride for the development team. Our timeline of the development, delivery and evaluation of the event will include: The design of light touch flexible framework incorporating social media. The decisions around having no learning objectives or target learners. The focus on fun and...more Adapting the MOOC model for mainstream education [689] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Can the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) model be used as a catalyst for new approaches to supporting mainstream university students? MOOCs, courses aimed at massive international audiences, require investment (approximately £30,000 per MOOC according to THE), hence why courses delivered via the big MOOC platforms such as FutureLearn and CourseEra are primarily developed by highly prestigious universities. An overriding concern for universities that do not have the resources to build courses that will reach out to a massive audience is, can development of open courses have a direct impact on how well we operate or how our students perform?...more Short Open Online CPD Courses [706] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Following a brief outline of four short courses on Continuing Professional Development (CPD) this session will describe the experience and challenges of running these courses for University staff. The four courses are ‘10 Days of Twitter’, ‘12 Apps of Christmas’, ‘5 Days of LinkedIn’ and ‘Blogging for Beginners’. The presentation will focus on how to set up these courses, how to manage the delivery of the course content and different ways to evaluate the effectiveness of this type of staff training.This session explores different formats for teaching social media as a medium for building a personal learning network and a...more Planning for networked learning: Developing a framework for teaching open courses [788] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm In this paper, we explore the benefits and challenges of open courses through a case study of several credit and non-credit courses offered over the past two years. In it, we examine our own as well as student experiences in Connectivist MOOC (cMOOC) and open-boundary courses, in order to develop a beginning framework for the facilitation of these types of classes. Specifically, this paper centres on three particular courses with which the authors have been involved. The first, EC&I 831, is an open access, graduate level course in educational technology offered through the Faculty of Education at a Canadian university;...more Navigating the boundary between formal and informal learning in higher education [752] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm This lightning talk will report on ongoing research in the area of open networked learning in higher education. The core question of the research project is: How can academic staff in higher education support students in bridging the divide between informal and formal learning? For our students, to be in higher education is to learn in two worlds: the open world of informal learning and the predominantly closed learning spaces of the institution. As networked individuals, students navigate multiple online spaces and identities. Open, networked practices enable them to form social connections, but also to engage in community, civic, and...more PODEMOS, a political open learning community [767] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The May 2011 “15M” revolution in Spain has been considered one of the most influential popular political movements in recent years in the world. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Spanish cities demanding a more democratic political system. Numerous demonstrations and events have taken place since then as a follow up and continue to happen. There is already abundant literature explaining how social media and open digital practice became instrumental in the articulation of the protests and the creation of new political spaces, both physical and digital. A new political body, the Indignados, with a digital backbone had...more Displaying Open Educational Resources on the CADARN Learning Portal [769] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm There are many ways to present your Open Educational Resource media to prospective students and colleagues. Whether it be documents, audio or video these resources are no good unless they are presented as the user wants to see them. They should be open in access as well as rights. With so many options for presentation the technologies you choose to show your resources to users is of paramount importance. For development of the CADARN Learning Portal we implemented a system of managing and displaying OERs within our website. The aim is to provide producers the platform to give users media...more Open practice and civic value: transforming pedagogy in language learning [664] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm OER is used by many as shorthand for openness in education. However, content and resources are just one aspect of education and the real power to transform pedagogy resides in the wider Open Educational Practices (Beetham, 2012), which focus on open pedagogy alongside open resources, technology, research and sharing. In this paper I focus on open practice that aims to turn ‘cognitive surplus into civic value’ (Shirky, 2010). I describe some of the opportunities afforded by the adoption of open practices to connect learning in the classroom with the real world outside formal education, and to encourage students to see...more [Cancelled] Open Educational Practice and Public Engagement: a case study from a less commonly taught language [669] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The project presented here investigates “the potential of new forms of public engagement enabled by new technology” (Scanlon, 2013: 3), using an example from a UK less-widely-taught language community (‘VirtualDutch’) that has been engaged in Open Educational Practices for quite some time (Verbaan, 2008; Tiedaus, 2013). It does so with the objective of developing, in close interaction with the historically interested public, a set of Dutch (and Flemish) Walks through London, highlighting the manifold connections between the Capital and the Low Countries through the centuries. The Walks will be released as Open Educational Resources in the form of leaflets, podcasts...more Meithrin myfyrwyr fel cynhyrchwyr / nurturing the student producer [718] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm This talk will chronicle the learning experience of the Learning Technology Team in Bangor University currently developing OER’s with student content producers including those working through the medium of Welsh. As part of the CADARN project the Learning Technology team in Bangor University is currently managing a number of OER development projects across the university in both Welsh and English. Bangor University has a very strong and established role in the development of Welsh language learning technology developing the initial Welsh Language Pack for Blackboard. In Bangor the CADARN Funding has been used not only to provide equipment but also...more A Typology of Institutional Practices for the Recognition of Open Learning in Europe [729] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm This paper reports on a study carried out from May to November 2014, as part of an investigation into institutional strategies used by European universities for opening up education, including the challenges and opportunities in the recognition of open learning achievements. The overall aim of the study was to support European policy development. The research team investigated institutional practices, attitudes and rationales for the types of recognition awarded for open learning, the factors that influenced decisions in this regard, and the contexts in which non-formal, open learning was recognised. Desk research was conducted to obtain an overview of which institutions...more Instructor lens on opening access via multi-access [755] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Instructor Lens on Opening Access via Multi-Access Learning Multi-access learning (Irvine, 2009; Irvine, 2010; Irvine, Code, & Richards, 2013) is the expansion of mainstream brick-and-mortar campus face-to-face courses into online modalities without creating a separate stream of online offerings. As instructors increasingly move from face-to-face to online modalities, in whole or in part, choices are made about whether that online space is closed or open. In this paper, the instructors of closed versions of multi-access courses will be interviewed regarding their course experiences and their perceptions about closed and open online pedagogy. As open culture begins to pervade post-secondary campuses,...more Modes and models of production of OERs: The missing link to wider adoption [784] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Much of the talk about OERs concerns their adoption and use. However, without proper consideration of the different models for their production, it is possible that a OERs will never become available at a volume and quality that makes their adoption a real possibility for institutions looking at a market where cost is only one of the considerations. The typical model is that of an individual content creator (or possibly an institution) who decides to share her materials. However, this rarely leads to sustainable and readily reusable materials. A more likely result is for these materials to languish unused in...more The Student Survival sMOOC - Designing and Piloting a course in partnership with students [690] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm This paper details the experience of designing and implementing a pilot sMOOC (Short Massive Open Online Course) on an all Wales collaborative basis working in partnership with student participants as co-creators. The pilot is a key deliverable from an initiative stemming from the signing of the Wales Open Education Declaration of Intent in September 2013. The sMOOC is a four week, online course, aimed at a global audience and provides a ‘Student Survival Guide’ to help with settling into university life in the first few weeks. It covers the key areas students should think about in the period between applying...more [Cancelled] MOOCs and NOOCs [714] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Since 2007, the University of Nottingham has released OER through the U-Now website. Resources made available in U-Now are offered under the Creative Commons ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’ licence, and users can view the resources on the site or download them in re-useable formats. The OER publication model at Nottingham is strong, with over 70% of schools having a U-Now presence. In addition to the U-Now website, the university has created a number of OER tools and services that support the creation and attribution of Creative Commons resources and images. These include the Xpert search engine, Xerte on-line toolkits, and the Xpert Image...more Massive Open Online Courses and Sustainability [733] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become very popular with millions of users from around the world registered with leading platforms. There are hundreds of universities offering MOOCs. However, sustainability of MOOCs is a pressing concern as MOOCs incur up front creation costs, maintenance costs to keep content relevant and on-going support costs to provide facilitation while a course is being run. At present, charging a fee for certification (for example Coursera Signature Track and FutureLearn Statement of Completion) seems a popular business model.The authors discuss other possible business models and their pros and cons. Some business models discussed here...more Student-led, OpenEd, and wiping away the open wash [683] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The development of OER policy at University of Edinburgh has been student-led from the start. As 2014 opened, the EUSA vice president for academic affairs challenged University senior managers to explore how learning materials could be made open, not only for students within the University, but across Scotland and to the wider world. These were heady days, the University was riding the wave of global interest in MOOCs, an NUS report was published to champion OER, there was an upcoming independence referendum and many in Scotland saw a strategic opportunity to contribute to a fairer society via open educational practice....more A case study of OER engagement and invisible practices: implications for policy and research [684] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm This presentation takes as its starting point a case study of teacher engagement with OER from a specific OER collection, LORO (Languages Open Resources Online, www.loro.open.ac.uk). The study investigated whether teachers followed the steps in the OER lifecycle (find, compose, adapt, use and share – Gurell 2008), as it has been argued that engagement with Open Educational Practices might enhance the quality of teaching. The study found that although teachers engage in the repurposing and sharing of OER, much of this is invisible, as it is not shared again openly. The assumption behind most of the OER cycles seems to...more Licensing for open education in Australia [757] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Universities in Australia have rapidly incorporated different forms of Open Educational Practice (OEP) into their activities. Of 39 universities, 20 are currently offering some form of ‘open’ online content or programs. However; only 5 of these are made available under an open access licence which would meet the definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) referred to in the UNESCO Paris Declaration.[1] Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne (Swinburne) and the University of Tasmania (UTas) are currently undertaking a joint research project, funded by the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching, to investigate: Open Education Licensing: Effective open licensing policy...more [Cancelled] CoPILOT: evaluating the impact of a community of practice approach to open educational resources [687] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Background CoPILOT (Community of Practice for Information Literacy Online Teaching) grew from a Jisc/HEA funded project to develop and share good practice within the library community to promote use and reuse of open educational resources (OER) to teach information literacy. This short talk will describe initial efforts to build a community of practice, the drivers and barriers along with our reflection on the impact that CoPILOT is having. It will also describe future plans. We will also have support material available including an updated version of the CoPILOT strategy for sharing resources online. Where we are now The initial CoPILOT...more Tapping into the cognitive surplus of student-generated content through OER [699] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has been successfully prompting the idea that knowledge is a public good (Camilleri, Daniel Ehlers, & Pawlowski, 2014), with its wide benefits in the area of higher education for governments, institutions, educators and learners (Hodgkinson-Wiliams, 2010; Hylén, 2007). However, on the social perspective, benefits are still to be realised through open educational practice (OEP). Therefore, this paper suggests that the OER potential benefits can be achieved through building communities of practice (Fulantelli, Taibi, Gentile, & Allegra, 2012; Wenger, 2006) inside higher educational institutions that embrace OER and OEP as a part of teaching strategies,...more Augmented Reality for Science Education [680] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm This lightning talk is to enlighten the OER community about a 3 year EU Erasmus+ funded project to ensure the development of STEM key competences and the intake of students in science-related career paths at lower secondary school level. The project has the dual aim of 1) developing and testing an innovative, called-for approach to science teaching and 2) giving students a more positive view of and attitude to science, thus helping enhance and promote science education across Europe by motivating students otherwise prone to giving up on science. The project will introduce Augmented Reality (AR) to develop a...more [Cancelled] Affordances of OER as an important tool to increase access [743] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The internet is changing pedagogical approaches through the availability of information, the ease of communication and the connectedness of online sharing. Teaching philosophies and teacher identities are being challenged amidst the tensions that arise from the dynamic and fluid educational landscape. Amidst these shifting practices there is a growing movement to promote Open Educational Resources (OER), described as learning materials that are freely available for use, remixing and redistribution. While the use of proprietary (copyright) material is accompanied by the need to pay royalties or license fees, OER negates this process. In education, and particularly in higher education, OER is...more Social networks and their role in Open Educational language Practice and interaction [667] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm There is an increasing body of literature on OER/OEP for language education. Within this field, topics addressed so far are among others OER for less used languages (Bradley & Vigmo, 2014), crowdsourcing and user-driven practices with OER (Beaven, T. et al., 2013), and OEP from a language teaching perspective (Beaven, Comas & Sawhill, 2013; Borthwick et al., 2014; Whyte et al., 2014). A topic that is much less explored is the way knowledge sharing and peer interaction develop around Open Educational Language Practice, especially when documented barriers to OEP expansion include limited OER uptake and few collaboration opportunities and practices...more A federate reference structure in an open informational ecosystem [738] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm It can be considered as one of the advantages that the production and distribution of learning materials is much easier in the digital world. The OER movement benefits from these possibilities. Whereas, publishing is one thing; the other is to maintain the material, to make it accessible and to implement methods for quality assurance – not only as the responsibility of one publisher but as a task for a whole educational system. Repositories of OER (ROER) can help to fulfil these tasks, if they follow some given criteria (Atenas & Havemann, 2014).Yet unsolved and underestimated is the question how to...more Open educational practices and attitudes to openness across India: reporting the findings of the OER Research Hub pan-India survey. [744] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm India appears to show a huge appetite for openness. In 2008 the Indian Government’s National Knowledge Commission (NKC) called for a ‘national e-content and curriculum initiative’ to stimulate the creation, adaptation and utilization of OER by Indian institutions and the leveraging of OER produced outside India. Since then India has gained its own national OER repository – the National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER) (http://nroer.gov.in/home/), launched in 2013, extending the existing provision of OER offered by repositories such as the Indira Ghandi National Open University (IGNOU)-hosted e-GyanKosh (http://www.egyankosh.ac.in/). Beyond the creation and delivery of content, open educational practices have...more Poster Session Tue, Apr 14 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Why and how the OU provides free learning [739] with Patrina Law The Open Education Handbook [681] with Marieke Guy New mobile app to benefit FE student hairdressers [686] with Louise Egan Promise of OER – Opening Educational Practices in Scotland [736] with Ronald Macintyre, Anna Page, and Pete Cannell Connecting Learners to Open Education [728] with Steve Dawes, and Chris Rowell MOCCA (Multimedia Open Course on Cost Accounting) [704] with Anke Pfeiffer, and Roland Erben OER15 – Voice of the people [694] with Lizi Hesling, Matt Cawte, Russ Basford, and Thomas Bartlett On the training track towards Open Science...more |
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Building startup Europe, one MOOC at a time. MOOCs and OERs for web talent: efficacy, acknowledgement and fit-for-purpose [746] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm The EC has highlighted the potential of web and mobile startups to boost economic growth and well-being in Europe. Yet this potential is threatened by a predicted shortage of over a million skilled workers. The MOOCS for web talent network was initiated by the EC’s Startup Europe initiative to address this challenge. During 2014, the network has run webinars, conducted desk research and a survey of employers, employees and MOOC providers, connected a workshop at EC TEL 2014, and a stakeholder meeting adjacent to Slush in Helsinki. The aim of this hybrid open event is to share the findings of...more From theory to practice: can openness improve the quality of OER research? (working title) [716] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Researching the impact of open educational resources (OER) in the open has been a core aim of the OER Research Hub project (OERRH) (1) since it began at the end of 2012. But has this open approach to research improved the quality of our research on the impact of OER? This paper explores the ways in which open research practices have enabled us to improve the quality of our research. We have utilized a range of open research practices including: 1) “Agile research” (2): our ability to be responsive to feedback and continuously evaluate the way in which we work...more Building Understanding of Open Education: An Overview of the Impact of OER on Teaching and Learning [717] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm The true power of comparative research around the impact and use of open educational resources is only just being realised, largely through the work done by the Hewlett-funded OER Research Hub. Since late 2012 the project has used a combination of surveys, interviews and focus groups to gather data about the use of OER by educators, formal learners and informal learners across the globe. This presentation will focus on the overall picture emerging from the project’s research to date, exploring key questions around OER use and attitudes. Areas that will be covered include: ‘Who is using OER and in what...more The Sustained Reach and Impact of Open Educational Resources [764] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm From 2009 to 2012, De Montfort University participated in the UK Open Educational Resource (OER) programme releasing bioscience materials, with the Virtual Analytical Laboratory (VAL), the SCOOTER Project and generic materials released in Biology Courses (Rolfe 2015). VAL OER were released on a static HTML website, whilst for phases 2 and 3, the premise was to use search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to enhance discovery by the liberal distribution of OER on the web, with hyperlinks back to project WordPress blogs to drive web traffic (Rolfe & Griffin 2011). The goals of these projects were to maximise the ‘reach and...more Use of OER in Polish schools - everyday practice and policy recomendations [685] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm The period since 2011 was groundbreaking for Polish schools. The Government implemented the “Digital School” project as a pilot creation of inclusive 14 e-textbooks for Polish schools. However, in recent months we have seen how the Ministry of Education in turn withdraws and then returns to the idea of the publication of those texbooks on the open licenses. We see that without appropriate provisions, this kind of fires will be put out each time when the Ministry considers this solution as too complicated to implement. We are convinced that in Poland it is necessary to provide free access to textbooks and...more Who knows how and who shares what: open education practices as an inclusive social innovation [679] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm This 90 minute workshop will build upon previous conference-based workshops investigating flows of knowledge exchange between multiple institutional actors in particular sectors of the economy (see Oreszczyn and Lane 2012a and 2012b). In this case the workshop will be a scoping study on knowledge flows to support institutional capacities and capabilities in open education practices in the UK which will be followed by a similar workshop looking at knowledge flows globally at the Open Education Consortium Global Conference later in April 2015 (http://conference.oeconsortium.org/2015/). Open educational resources (OER) and the related open educational practices (OEP) that use them are premised on...more Creating OER and embedding Open Practice - identifying challenges and achievements for change. [732] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm OER15 offers an opportunity to tackle major issues for OER/P directly by the practitioners working in the domain. This workshop will address the problems in creating and embedding Open resources and Practices on behalf of various disciplines within Higher Education and agree targets for the short to long term. We are in a significantly constrained funding environment and are likely to be so for a considerable time yet, and yet the effective exchange of Open Educational Resources and Open Practice still fails to be recognised by the Higher Education system for its full potential. Why is this? Are the barriers...more Nothing stops us now or mainstreamed open educational practices, real examples from HE [668] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Collaborative practice is the way forward – together we can be resourceful and make things happen. Money for development projects has dried up and often, if there is any available, the big sharks get there first. If you are small and want to develop open learning opportunities, you might or not, have seed funding to go ahead. However, there are advantages to independent unfunded projects: you will be able to move faster and make things happen more easily. Weller (2011) called this little Open Educational Resources (OER) and includes small-scale open practices. Finding like-minded people to work with is no...more Developing an institutional Open Educational Resources policy [682] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm I am a member of the coPilot project which promotes the use of OERs in information literacy. I became aware that there was no guidance and promotion on OERs in the university. To deal with this, I created the Library guidance on OERs web page which was based on the Leeds University advice. However people were not about to share their own resources until they knew exactly where they stood with regard to departmental and institutional policy. They were afraid that they may lose ownership and the right to use material they created if they moved to a new institution....more The spaces of open educational experience [745] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Recent years have seen significant progress made in the creation and sharing of Open Educational Resources. It remains a struggle to foster open online educational experiences, particularly in resource-constrained environments. Choosing and supporting tools, convincing peers and partners to take risks — these are all as difficult to do now as ever. At times, the current discourse around learning environments seems to have hardened between the provision of centrally-managed and rigidly controlled systems, and the wide-open “personal cyberinfrastructure” approach. The intent of this session is to foster a discussion to address these tensions. From the lens of a smallish open...more Good academic practice for final year projects [708] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Referencing has been described as an “an ideologically inscribed institutional practice of mystery” (Lillis 2001, p14). We will present a series of OERs designed to allow students to explore concepts of referencing, citation, paraphrasing and plagiarism avoidance. Our new students are introduced to concepts of good academic practice in the Plagiarism avoidance for new students course. This course concentrates on definitions and avoidance of plagiarism, presented in a non-threatening and non-punitive fashion. It is compulsory for all new students and is available for sharing and re-use. In 2014 we were given an award by the Academic and Research Libraries Group...more Exploring the Feasibility of Awarding Open Badges to Jorum Users. [761] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Introduction This session will explain the rationale to the award of an Open Badge for either the depositing and/or the reuse of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in Jorum. A pilot project is being conducted that integrates with the current Jisc FE and Skills Window project[1], an area identified as requiring OER growth in Jorum. Method Preliminary research investigated the different mechanisms that served as triggers for the award of an Open badge and how this badge is delivered. It was discovered that we had three approaches that we could take: Use a 3rd party issuing system; Use a specially designed...more Issues in creating and using video resources for language teaching. [692] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm The University Language Centre and the Centre for Applied Linguistics are partners in an EU project called Video for All. The project’s mission is to support language teachers in all sectors in the exploitation of video for teaching. The Language Centre has been innovating in the use of digital media for some time and is the subject of a Jisc Digital Media case study. Video for All will produce exemplar practices for teachers which are searchable and available as Open Educational Resources. However, challenges are evident. At another University in Melbourne research is underway into computer-mediated communication and language teaching...more Policy development to support OER in Wales [749] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm The POERUP project “Policies for OER Uptake”, running from late 2011 to mid 2014, had a substantial focus on policy development – covering six countries in 2014: five in the EU including the UK, and also Canada. For the UK, three papers were developed: for Wales, Scotland and England. Each home nation posed particular challenges: in Wales there was emerging policy; in Scotland there was an informal policy grouping but no actual policy and little project activity; yet in England there was or had been much project activity and several policy-relevant reports but no actual policies. This paper, covering OER...more Open Government Partnership as a platform for advancing Open Education policy [778] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm National governments can help accelerate the Open Education movement both directly through supportive policies and projects, and indirectly by promoting awareness and support within civil society. A recent report by Creative Commons found that 14 countries have already made national-level commitments to Open Education.[1] Over the last year, an exciting new avenue for establishing and expanding such commitments has emerged through the Open Government Partnership (OGP). OGP is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.[2] It formally launched in 2011, when 8...more Ownership of Collaborative Open Educational Initiatives in the Absence of Policy [791] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Part-funded through the HEA/JISC OER programme, the Global Dimensions in Higher Education (GD in HE) project has been developing a fully online open course to engage educators in critically exploring and debating global issues in higher education. Originally undertaken as a collaborative initiative between three UK universities, the project has two broad aims: the first to develop and then pilot the GD in HE course with a view to the course being repurposed in education-related postgraduate programmes for academics, and the second to research and document the challenges in designing and developing a joint online course across multiple partners. The...more Opening Educational Practices in Scotland [696] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm OEPS is a new cross-sector project in Scotland. The project has two principle aims: To facilitate best practice in open education in Scotland through the development of a peer support network, an online hub and awareness raising activities. To enhance the Scottish tertiary education sector’s capacity and reputation in developing publicly available online materials supported by high quality pedagogy and learning technology. The potential for OER to transform higher education (HE) has been widely remarked (e.g. Welsh Government, 2014). Other authors (e.g. D’Antoni, 2013) have explored the contribution that OER can make to widening participation in HE and recasting the...more Embedding Open Education Resources & Open Educational Practice across the HE Sector in Wales – A Project Overview & Update [697] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm This paper details the experience of a pan Wales project to embed open educational resources (OER’s) and open educational practice (OEP) across the Welsh Higher Education Sector. To enable the project to meet the aspirations of the declaration of intent and recommendations of the Online Digital Learning Working group, the project team worked in collaboration with JISC and the HEA to build on previously successful projects. The project has developed a website/portal to showcase the best OER’s in Wales, and aims to strengthen OEP within every part of university life through promoting the creation, use and re-purposing of OER’s. The...more Mainstreaming OER – policies, strategies or initiatives? [722] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Although there are many policies for OER in individual HE institutions, both across Europe and worldwide, there are relatively few national or international policies related to open education which specifically identify OER. Many of the policies listed in the Creative Commons registry are either merely declarations of intent, or policy statements that lack clear strategies for implementation: several of the policies listed there are either gathering dust or propositions for action at some future unspecified date. Furthermore, where national policies do exist (there are many examples from the US) their scope is largely limited to open access to publicly funded...more Mainstreaming Open Educational Practice in a Research University: Prospects and Challenges [734] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Increasingly, the case is made that OER should be deployed within pedagogic practices that ‘rely on social interaction, knowledge creation, peer-learning, and shared learning practices’ (Ehlers, 2011: 6). Within an individual institution, this may entail exploring the relationship between the principles and practices of openness in education and the values and practices espoused by individual academics, in order to identify an optimal institutional approach to OEP (open educational practice). This paper reports on an investigation into this relationship at a leading research-intensive university with substantial OER collections that reflect its strategic priority for global reach (AnonRef1, nd). Additionally, numerous staff...more Smart, Social, Open and Media Enhanced Learning: the power of the multiplier effect [691] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm This paper introduces the idea of Smart Learning: the convergence of diverse innovative methods that each disrupt long standing approaches to teaching and learning in post-compulsory education, and that together create an educational philosophy that is widely accessible, open, flexible and convincing. Smart Learning will be described with reference to examples produced by academic innovators in an open writing project. From this the concept will be scoped to include the disruptive use of rich digital media, social media, and smart mobile technology, and the phenomena of BYOD, Open Educational Practice, and User-Generated Content. While this mix suggests a challenging cocktail...more Are student-led Facebook groups open educational practices? [720] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm The lure of Facebook for university students has grown in recent years, with many defecting from institution provided formal online tuition spaces to student-led, study-focused groups on the social media platform. Various studies (see Tess, 2013) have evaluated the impact of institution-led use of Facebook within the context of formal education. However, only recently have researchers begun to explore learner-driven Facebook use (e.g. Dron and Anderson, 2014; Gardner, 2014; Kent and Leaver, 2014). Our study contributes to this research and is grounded in two stimuli: (1) our previous research into self-educating, online forum and Facebook-based informal learning communities, conducted when developing...more Openness and Ethics [727] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm What difference does openness make to ethics? This session will examine this question both from the perspective of research into OER and the use of open resources in teaching and learning. An outline of the nature and importance of ethics will be provided before the basic principles of research ethics are outlined through an examination of the guidance provided by National Institutes of Health (2014) and BERA (2014). The importance and foundation of institutional approval for OER research activities is reiterated with a focus on underlying principles that can also be applied openly. I argue that with a shift to...more Students as agents of change: Experiences of co-producing a mOOC [782] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm This case study reports how a project supporting medical students at the University of Dundee School of Medicine to develop peer-led online teaching approaches has led to the development of a mini open online course (mOOC) approach to developing medical students’ skills as digital teachers. Dundee Medical School has traditionally supported peer-led learning approaches and has a well established peer tutoring programme for years 1-3, taught by year 4 and 5 students. With growing engagement with learning technologies, students also developed their own wikis and blogs badged as DundeePRN. This experience helped develop professionalism as students took responsibility for content...more Enabling a multilingual approach to open education resources in a Welsh Context [703] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Context:Wales is a bi-lingual nation and the universities here are committed to producing a wide range of materials available in both English and Welsh. As part of an all Wales initiative, one of the initial resources created jointly by the consortium of universities was the Student Survival Guide. This resource comprised a Short Massive Open Online Course (sMOOC) with a requirement for that resource to be available both in English and Welsh. This created three options for the course creators – • to create two separate resources, one in each language• to create a single resource displaying both languages together• to...more StartUP:A cross-border OER project [715] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm The StartUP Project is supported/co-funded by the European Commission Lifelong Learning Programme – KA3 – ICT Multilateral Projects and is an innovative cross border project led by SOPHIA Research & Innovation in Italy with partners across Europe: BEST Institut für berufsbezogene Weiterbildung undPersonaltraining GmbH, Austria; UPM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain; FWE, Foundation forWomen Entrepreneurs, Malta; CECE, Confederation of Education and Training Centres, Spain; InovaConsultancy, England; Profesia, Italy. The project is linking Open Educational Resources and the entrepreneurial sector aiming to fill a blank spot for open and flexible entrepreneurial training opportunities which reach the lifelong learner. The project aims...more Building partnership for international education through open courses [748] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm International education has gained public attention as one result of the rapid development of MOOCs which promise to expand universities’ market reach and promote the globalisation of their higher education agenda. In response to this new development, higher education institutions need to assess, prepare and adapt their global engagement strategies to the new opportunities presented by MOOCs and other forms of open online learning. The challenges are how open courses and MOOCs can be used effectively to help UK universities to develop their brand internationally and to expand their international market strategically. In this light talk, we will look at...more Developing global graduates through open access language and business tools [787] Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Supporting Global Graduates through open access language and business tools Coventry University is committed to developing graduates who can function well in global communities and who understand and embrace different cultural and business approaches. There are many opportunities for students to engage with peers in other countries and cultures both through online projects and travel. The Faculty of Business, Environment and Society is using open access resources to take developing our global student communities a step further. Before non-native English speakers start their substantive Undergraduate and Postgraduate degree courses, they access an intensive, collaborative approach to teaching English academic language,...more Poster Session Tue, Apr 14 2015, 2:00pm – 4:00pm Why and how the OU provides free learning [739] with Patrina Law The Open Education Handbook [681] with Marieke Guy New mobile app to benefit FE student hairdressers [686] with Louise Egan Promise of OER – Opening Educational Practices in Scotland [736] with Ronald Macintyre, Anna Page, and Pete Cannell Connecting Learners to Open Education [728] with Steve Dawes, and Chris Rowell MOCCA (Multimedia Open Course on Cost Accounting) [704] with Anke Pfeiffer, and Roland Erben OER15 – Voice of the people [694] with Lizi Hesling, Matt Cawte, Russ Basford, and Thomas Bartlett On the training track towards Open Science...more |
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Live Streamed
KEYNOTE: Josie Fraser Tue, Apr 14 2015, 4:30pm – 5:15pm Download Josie Fraser’s Presentation more |
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Live Streamed
KEYNOTE: Sheila MacNeill Wed, Apr 15 2015, 9:00am – 10:00am Download Sheila MacNeill’s Keynote Slides more |
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Digital curation- avoiding content overload and developing literacies [789] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 10:00am – 11:00am Students can feel overwhelmed with the rising amount of publicly available content which is free to access online. Digital curation sites allow educators to select the online content which they see as most relevant to their students. It is not just about producing a list of weblinks but adding value by explaining to students what is particularly good about the resource and what the weaknesses might be. Students can also be active co-curators and this workshop will be copresented with them. Intended outcomes: 1To be familiar with the concept of digital curation and some of the tools which are available...more Connecting learners and communities in Wales to Open Education Resources [742] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 10:00am – 11:00am If we wish to connect people and communities with open education resources (OER), especially those farthest removed from learning, simply creating and putting the OER out into the ether might not be enough. Deliberate and proactive steps need to be taken to make these connections, bringing people and learning opportunities together. Through various widening access initiatives we are using OER content to reach out to non-traditional learners and help them start a learning journey, which for some results in accredited learning and formal qualifications. We use our OER content to enable people to: Gain an insight into higher education study...more The cost of not going open! [766] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 10:00am – 11:00am The cost-saving benefits of engaging with open education initiatives has long been cited as one of the driving forces behind the sustainability of the movement. In the US, undoubtedly, faculty engagement with open textbooks saves significant cost to students, and these actions act as a lever to promote the open education cause and national policy (for example the work of David Wiley and Lumen Learning). In the UK the argument for student cost benefits of open text books has never been fully made, and cost-benefit models of other forms of open education initiatives have been ill-explored. A pilot survey of...more What the FOOC? Supporting staff in preparing to become open and online learners. [675] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 10:00am – 11:00am “Far from realizing the high ideals of their advocates, MOOCs seem to be reinforcing the advantages of the ‘haves’ rather than educating the ‘have-nots’,” Ezekiel J. Emanuel commenting on his paper with Christensen, G. et al., 2013 Other similar emerging studies also conclude that MOOCs are predominantly the reserve of those with a higher education experience, as supported by the University of Edinburgh MOOC Report (2013) which stated; “Over 70% of respondents indicated completion of degree-level academic achievement; a total of 40% respondents had achieved a postgraduate degree.” Despite this, MOOCs also generally suffer from high rates of student “non-completion”...more Open Content Toolkit Workshop [678] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 10:00am – 11:00am There has been a significant increase in the quantity and quality of open resources hosted in online media archives. This can be attributed to the increasing digitisation of cultural artefacts, allied with a global trend towards to openness, brought about by a growing uptake of Open and Creative Commons licences. This new digital landscape is providing some innovative opportunities for learning and research. One recent example of this was when the British Library uploaded over one million images into the public Domain on Flickr Commons. It seems a fair assumption that many of these collections will be familiar within the...more Promoting Culture Change, Creative Media Production and Open Practice in Wales [693] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 10:00am – 11:00am The Cadarn Learning Portal aims to lower barriers, provide support and enable teaching staff across Wales to produce educational media using best and open practice. The resultant educational media is then used to entice the next generation of students by showing inspirational OERS alongside information about the courses they are used in. The portal has two aspects: Firstly, information for lecturers supporting best practice in TEL and many OER’s created by us about OER production in HE and the equipment the project has provided our partners. Secondly (but at least as importantly) a browseable extensive database of study schemes from...more Introduction to the OER World Map Project [750] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 10:00am – 11:00am Since several years there has been a discussion about “OER mapping” within the open education community. As an early milestone Susan D’Antoni presented her vision of an OER World Map at the 2012 UNESCO OER World Congress in Paris. 2013 The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation decided to fund an OER World Map project existing of two phases. After three prototypes were developed in phase I by the Institute of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), the Brazilian Mira project and the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz) at the beginning of 2014, Hewlett Foundation announced just recently that a team...more Poster Session Wed, Apr 15 2015, 10:00am – 11:00am Why and how the OU provides free learning [739] with Patrina Law The Open Education Handbook [681] with Marieke Guy New mobile app to benefit FE student hairdressers [686] with Louise Egan Promise of OER – Opening Educational Practices in Scotland [736] with Ronald Macintyre, Anna Page, and Pete Cannell Connecting Learners to Open Education [728] with Steve Dawes, and Chris Rowell MOCCA (Multimedia Open Course on Cost Accounting) [704] with Anke Pfeiffer, and Roland Erben OER15 – Voice of the people [694] with Lizi Hesling, Matt Cawte, Russ Basford, and Thomas Bartlett On the training track towards Open Science...more |
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Harmonising OER research across South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia: The case of the ROER4D project [710] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Enabled by the growing accessibility to the Internet, alternative intellectual property mechanisms such as Creative Commons, evolving metadata practices and the growing “open” movement, the emergence of open educational resources (OER) has been hailed as a potentially fruitful response to some of the key challenges faced by education in the Global South. While some research is emerging on the use and impact of OER in addressing these pressing educational challenges, most of this research is being undertaken in the Global North. The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project was launched in August 2013 with the express intention...more Non-English speakers’ use of OER: consumers or contributors? [719] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The OER Research Hub (OERRH) is a project funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to investigate the impact of OER on learning and teaching practices. Working internationally in collaboration with projects across the school (K-12), college, higher education and informal learning sectors, the OER Research Hub is building a network of evidence for and against eleven hypotheses relating to OER, in addition to establishing methods and instruments for broader engagement in researching the impact of openness on learning. Since 2013 the project has gathered survey data about the use of OER by educators, formal and informal learners. Out...more Comparing different open educational repositories for sharing problem based learning and virtual patient resources [790] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Introduction Open Educational Repositories (OERs) were initiated with reference to the three freedoms, namely, the freedom to study a work and apply knowledge offered from it; freedom to redistribute copies of it; freedom to make improvements or other changes. Quite obviously the whole point was to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited, but also, in more revolutionary or contemporary terms, to equip them with mechanisms of allowing the spread of their work by means of sharing it with other interested parties and stakeholders. Sharing classic material is usually...more [Cancelled] Large scale OER creation through automated natural language processing [705] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The high cost of creating OER is an important issue that needs to be addressed to increase the amount of available OER. We propose use of automated machine learning methods to increase the quality of available resources and decrease the cost of creation for certain domains. We survey the capabilities of state-of-the-art natural language processing tools and investigate their potential application to various OER generation problems. A practical application in language teaching, which is identified as a high promise domain, is also introduced. Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of machine learning that deals with unprocessed natural language. Classifying...more Open Education in the 1990s: Revisiting the History of the Open Education Movement [725] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Introduction The early days of the open education movement, particularly in the pre-Web 2.0. era, appears to be sparsely documented. According to Wiley (2007, p.1), there is a lack of specific scholarly mention of open educational resources (OER) prior to 1994. To document a more robust history of the early OER movement, we will interview OER pioneers in an effort to preserve the evolutionary practices of open education, document their work, preserve their formative practices, and share their artefacts. Open Education History in Broad Strokes The current history of OER largely cites MIT’s 2002 initiative of publishing 50 open courses...more MUS654 Creating a Curriculum [765] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm MUS654 is the first open music course to be run in the UK. It is a final year undergraduate music course that challenges students to create a year’s curriculum for a private student. This is the second year the course has run, and the students on it changed to a new 4-year BMus programme. This has meant actual student numbers are very small yet. The students on the course have already had three years of modules covering pedagogical methods and considering technical aspects of teaching their instruments. This module aims to encourage students to solidify their knowledge as they prepare...more Creative OER Planning: Tricks & Techniques [724] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm I would like to give a 45 presentation on the process of creatively planning OERs. The presentation will be based on my experience planning an OER project for an academic library in Wales, in a short space of time. It will cover elements such as mindmapping the OERs, balancing usefulness versus distinctiveness, using puppets and iphones to create a short demo version of a proposed film, involving students and the local community, bilingualism and accessibility. I will discuss inspirations for the project, and the two films we are working on: “library voices” (an overview of the library featuring our service users) and...more Landscape of OER Projects and Policies for primary and secondary education in Europe [751] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The launch of the “Opening Up Education” initiative of the European Commission in 2013 has been commonly seen as a milestone for the development of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement in Europe. The initiative includes OERs as one of the four key “areas” of policy intervention. At the same time, the document has been criticised for “thinned down” standards and definitions of OER. Nevertheless, and even taking into account Commissions’ lack of influence over domestic educational systems of member states, this is an important development. At the same time, a range of OER projects and policy initiatives has been...more [Cancelled] Lesson learned from Implementation of OER in the nursing program, Dalarna University, Sweden (IMPOERS) [781] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm In the project IMPOERS, we have introduced Open Education Resources (OER) in a nursing program. OER is one of the strongest driving forces for personalized learning. In the presentation we will report the preliminary results from the project. The use of OER is increasing in higher education. UNESCO stresses the pedagogical benefits of using OER (Hylén 2012, McGreal 2013, Punie & Haché UNESCO 2012). Today, the use of the web as an open source for knowledge acquisition is accepted in higher education providing new pedagogical possibilities and support for competence development. This impacts on students’ and teachers ‘roles and responsibility...more Open Science Happens Somewhere: Exploring the use of Science OER in Schools [726] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm This paper concerns a pilot exploring the use of openly licensed content in secondary schools. Specifically it looks at the use of the Open University’s (OU) OpenScienceLab (OSL) in two remote rural schools in the West Highlands of Scotland. OSL is a series of online experiments openly licensed for anyone to use, they are about learning through experimentation, and are part of a wider OU interest in how to support and develop inquiry based learning at a distance (Scanlon 2012). This area is of particular relevance to Scottish schools, as the underlying pedagogy of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) promotes interdisciplinary...more Opening up in the FE and Skills Sector [759] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Introduction This lightning talk will present to delegates the recent OER initiatives by Jisc in the FE and Skills sector. It will provide an overview of the Jisc FE Skills Window Project, which is developing a number of tools that aim to create more flexible and simple routes to open content relevant to FE practitioners. The Window will also act as a showcase for the OERs created by the Jisc funded, Interactive Learning Resources for Skills projects. These are 22 projects developing and sharing OERs across a number of Further Education vocational subject areas. The talk will highlight how these...more Co-Curate: working with schools and communities to add value to Open collections [730] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Co-Curate is an AHRC funded cross-disciplinary project working with schools and community groups in the North of England, which combines use of Openly licensed materials from museums and archives with informal community based resources. A participative Website has been developed to enable students to create ‘mashups’ of materials from existing Open collections and mix in their own materials to co-curate stories of the North East. The purpose of this presentation is to provide an overview of how we have used Open collections in both formal and informal educational contexts and to share our initial findings in relation to stakeholders knowledge...more Common Ground – an overview of the open education landscape in Scotland. [695] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The profile of open education in Scotland has risen significantly over the last year and open education initiatives have increased across all Scottish education sectors. Such is the profile of open education that, in their State of the Commons report, Creative Commons named Scotland among fourteen nations that have made national commitments to open education, through legislation or projects that lead to the creation, increased use or improvement of OER. This paper will present an overview of the open education landscape in Scotland, focusing on significant policy and practice advances and identifying some of the drivers that have influenced these...more Moving from Institutional OER Guidance to Changing Landscapes [777] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm In November 2012 institutional OER guidance at the University of Leeds was agreed, encouraging staff and students to use, create, and publish OER, and recommending that written and interactive digital teaching resources should be deposited in JORUM.In March2014 the Leeds’ Open Window was launched. The Window is powered by Jorum and offers a direct portal to Leeds content. It features the University’s own customisation and branding. The Window was the first of its kind in the UK HE sector and “is a key element to delivering goals of Leeds’ policy on OER andultimately their digital learning strategy”. These two developments...more What educational policy needs OER and what policy support does OER need? [786] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Although Open Educational Resources (OER) have been one of the mainstays of discussion on open education over the past decade, we are now noticing a renewed attention of policy makers in the topic. Whilst many really cool initiatives are to be found around the world (for instance in Germany http://ow.ly/EdLOX ), OER can really only realize its potential in the mainstream, if it tackles mainstream problems. That means that it is important to re-start the discussion on OER so that there is a focus on OER as a means to an end, i.e. OER contributing to improving various aspects of...more Controlling Creativity- Improving the quality of open education research through a blended project management environment [711] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funded OER Research Hub is an ambitious project which combines research collaboration with existing OER initiatives; an international fellowship program; and a global hub for research data and excellence in practice (McAndrew & Farrow, 2013). Managing and co-ordinating a project of this scope raised a number of challenges. The project team sought to blend a traditional and agile project management environment to create the most responsive, flexible and creative hybrid environment possible to accommodate the project’s ambitions, while maintaining the Institute of Educational Technology’s (IET) reputation for the delivery of high quality research....more Opening OER to more students through computer supported peer tutoring [747] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm In this session we report on the design of PyTutor, an Open Education Resource (OER) for studying computer science (CS) online. PyTutor, a web-based learning platform, is open across several dimensions: its code is released under a Free Software license and hosted publicly on GitHub; CS tasks and solutions, as in a wiki, can be modified by all users, and are released with a Creative Commons license; and, when the site opens to the public, it will be free of charge. Further, PyTutor is a design experiment in ways peer tutoring fosters open learning. The computational thinking movement makes strong...more Going with the flow: open waters and social tributaries [774] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm This session aims to examine the merging of formal and informal learning spaces within open educational practices and consider their impact so far and potential for the future. The session will be participative with attendees invited to contribute their thoughts and develop ideas that will help mainstream open education for learners and other communities. After more than a decade there is a substantial body of material & practice to evidence open education in the wider learning landscape. That landscape is an ever-changing picture influenced by many things, for example political objectives and the economy but in terms of solutions perhaps...more Developing a bilingual OER portal: the case of OpenLearn Cymru [741] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm OpenLearn Cymru has been developed to provide access to Open Education Resources that have particular relevance to Wales. The portal has strong links to OpenLearn, but provides content in both Welsh and English. OpenLearn Cymru now offers a platform for The Open University and partners from higher education and others sectors to create and deploy OER that meet the specific linguistic and educational needs of learners in Wales and/or those interested about Wales. This presentation will provide an overview of: the context and rationale for developing a bilingual OER portal for Wales the practicalities of planning and building...more At the Intersection of Open Practice and Inter-University Collaboration: eMundus Project [754] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm The eMundus Project funded by the European Comission promotes ways “to help establish long-term international partnership, aiming for an open international setting where universities cooperate based on their capacity not only to attract international students but to meaningfully cooperate and share experiences with counterpart universities.”(eMundusProject, 2014) eMundus can be understood as studying, promoting, and enabling collaborations between universities, enabled by open practice – or promoting initiatives at the intersection of open practice and inter-university collaboration. eMundus endeavours to do this by mapping out patterns of open practice collaboration between universities via an online atlas, providing written reports of open practice...more Common Core and Common Ground: New Standards as Driver for Open Educational Resources and Practice in American Schools [768] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm To what extent have the Common Core State Standards (2010) impacted the production, reuse and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) in the United States? Our case study, prepared in collaboration with two European organisations, examines this topic as part of a Scoping Study on The Potential of Shared, Cross-border OER and Syllabi in Europe. This talk outlines our findings both within individual states and across US state borders. We review the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative’s origins, key stakeholders and implementation model, finding that the CCSS have indeed spurred development of both open educational resources and open educational...more Poster Session Wed, Apr 15 2015, 11:30am – 1:00pm Why and how the OU provides free learning [739] with Patrina Law The Open Education Handbook [681] with Marieke Guy New mobile app to benefit FE student hairdressers [686] with Louise Egan Promise of OER – Opening Educational Practices in Scotland [736] with Ronald Macintyre, Anna Page, and Pete Cannell Connecting Learners to Open Education [728] with Steve Dawes, and Chris Rowell MOCCA (Multimedia Open Course on Cost Accounting) [704] with Anke Pfeiffer, and Roland Erben OER15 – Voice of the people [694] with Lizi Hesling, Matt Cawte, Russ Basford, and Thomas Bartlett On the training track towards Open Science...more |
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The more things change: synergy and dissonance in Open Access (OA) and Open Education (OE) [677] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm Significant developments in OA, driven by HEFCE’s “Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework” state that authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts must be deposited in a repository on acceptance for publication i.e. “green” OA. In many ways the policy is a response to the Finch report and RCUK policy which emphasise “gold” whereby a journal provides immediate OA to articles on the publisher’s website and may levy a fee as an alternative to library subscription. There is consensus that established models of scholarly communication, especially related to copyright, inhibit scientific progress, and RCUK emphasise that gold OA must...more Raising institutional capacity to work with OER: Are we pushing at an open door? [735] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm There is a steadily accumulating body of evidence that the best use of OER at organisational level is enabled by staff who are both aware and capable. However, the pathway to this goal is not always clear: the levels of skills at producing and using OER are highly variable within institutions and across the sector. A number of approaches to staff development in this area have been adopted, involving a range of staff roles including teaching staff, and those in supporting roles from libraries, IT departments, and learning technologists. It is early days yet, but some useful models of good...more Reaching the World Without Costing the Earth: FutureLearn MOOCs [756] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm In 2013, FutureLearn launched and University of Leicester joined as a partner. In late 2013 and early 2014, University of Leicester launched its first two MOOCs: England in the Time of King Richard III and Forensic Science and Criminal Justice. These MOOCs were extensively evaluated and discovered to have a very high student completion rate (approximately 25% of all registrants completed study, compared to average MOOC completion rates often at 5% to 10%), relatively low production and running costs, and some simple and clever innovations in creating learning material and engaging discussion. Moreover, there are early indications that MOOC students...more Is Germany taking the fast track to OER? A status report from the country that nearly missed the call [702] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm Germany missed the debatte on OER for the first 10 years. Now it seems that the country wants to catch up to the international discussions on the fast track. There have been more acitivities in the last 2 years than in the 10 years before all together. For the end of 2014 we are expecting a political commitment on OER by the KMK (Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany) which might lead to not only one but 16 policies. Concurrently we are facing the first federal budget for...more CAMEI project: the backbone of open education for healthcare workforce in the EU and US [771] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm Introduction An increased number of efforts are being monitored towards fostering Open Medical Education during the last decade. Open Education across Europe and US especially in the field of Medical Education is being developed in parallel with a lot of different tools, approaches, curriculum and policies to take place in different regions. An EC co-funded CSA project aims to act as the backbone for open education for healthcare workforce in the EU and US and merge the chiasm between the two sides of the Atlantic in order common efforts to further boost the open education in terms of practice and...more Open licensing is an accessibility and inclusion feature of OERs [772] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm Much talk about accessibility is focused on removing primary barriers to the content for those with specific needs (perceptual, cognitive or physical). This can be done with a closed license document as much as an open license document provided it is not encumbered with Digital Rights Management restrictions. However, in practice, restrictive licensing comes with other restrictive practices that prevent accessibility. In many countries, it is legal to make accessible copies despite other restrictions but this requires setting their users apart and putting other barriers in their way. This brief talk will showcase several case studies demonstrating how closed licensing...more Have the licensing talk early to maximise impact: Experiences from three collaborative projects [785] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm The outputs of many collaborative projects often see limited use in the long term because neither partner is quite sure what is permitted. Frequently, the people involved in the creation of content have left their institutions and futher use and distribution of the developed works is in doubt. Yet, in most projects, the talk about rights and licensing is left till close to the end or is omitted all together. People talk about the value of intellectual property but they never explore the limits unclarities about licensing impose on the potential impact of outputs. It is therefore essential that the...more The informed health consumer Mooc: learning from all the evidence [731] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm Massive open online courses (Moocs) have been in very short order both a revolutionary educational paradigm for 21st century and a grave disappointment. In late 2012 the New York Times was declaring “The Year of the MOOC” (Pappano 2012) whilst a year later Sebastian Thrun described as “the godfather of the MOOC” was declaring them to be “a lousy product” (Chafkin 2013). Among the concerns levelled at MOOCs are that they: – Cater largely to middle-class people educated to degree level so they are ‘preaching to the converted’ rather than attracting those new to higher education. (Emanuel 2013) – Have...more Twitter in open education: Using Google Sheets for the archiving and analysis of course discussion [740] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm Open education increasingly removes the constraint of a ‘place’ both physical and virtual for learners and educators to come together and learn. One of the challenges with distributed education is making learners and teachers situational aware[ref] of those who may be active in the community. Other studies have reported a diversity of tools and services to support open education courses (Fini, 2009 & Hawksey, 2012). One such tool which is regularly used as part of the mainstreaming of open education is the micro-blogging service Twitter. There are a number of features of Twitter which make it a natural fit for...more The Role of Multi-Access Learning in Mainstreaming Open Education [723] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm It can be argued that without online learning, there is no open. Open inherently holds the characteristic of being online, while online does not inherently hold the characteristic of being open. Early online courses were almost entirely closed, and the proliferation of closed learning management systems (LMS) has, unfortunately, become the norm. This continuation of closed online learning culture is largely because most central services supporting online learning on campuses present the closed LMS option by default to those who request moving or creating a course online. As comfort and experience develops in an online modality, so does the likelihood...more Developing Resources to Support Transition from College Based HE to an HE Campus – a staff and student perspective. [779] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm Introduction Transition from Level 2 study to post-16 education and transition from school or college to Higher Education are areas of concern for many of us working in those sectors. These are so-called ‘traditional’ learners who form the majority of the undergraduate population in Higher Education. In many widening access institutions, significant effort will be placed on developing induction programmes aimed at easing the transition into HE and boosting retention. The University of South Wales works with a large number of partner colleges both in Wales and across the UK, as well as with institutions overseas to provide more flexible...more Building an atlas of change that everyone can edit: the MapStory experience [666] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm This short paper will present past progress and future plans for MapStory.org, a platform that empowers a global community to organize knowledge about the world spatially and temporally, rather than encyclopedically as Wikipedia has done so well. MapStory launched a prototype in January 2013 and has since been tested by 1500 people, viewed by over 120 million across six continents, and used by major publications like the Washington Post and Vox. In early 2015 MapStory will launch as a Beta with new features developed during the prototyping process, such as distributed versioned editing for data and a new composer for...more Working with Community Educators to find the OEP 'light bulb' moments. [776] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm This lightning talk will provide an account of an action research project in Open Educational Practice undertaken with a group of part -time community learning tutors. This project was established as a collaborative research project following the recommendations of the Further Education Learning Technology Action Group (FELTAG) group which aimed to ‘nudge’ the FE sector in England to use technology more widely and effectively. The report offered a number of recommendations which recognised the importance of good CPD and management strategic vision. Many practitioners have noted the recommendation at least 10% of all courses should be delivered online. In some...more Opening Up Welsh Medium Higher Education: An example for other lesser used European Languages [712] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm Since the establishment of the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol (the Welsh National College) in 2011 dedicated to the further development of Higher Education delivered in Welsh, technology enhanced learning has been a central part of the Coleg’s academic strategy. A central pillar of such learning has been the provision of open educational resources in Welsh that are available for students across universities in Wales, and beyond, of course. The aim of this paper is to consider and assess the development of OERs in Welsh since 2011 – and to consider the extent to which the Welsh experience may be replicable in...more Mapping OER via semantic wikis [753] Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm This presentation describes the approach taken by an externally-funded series of analytic projects in OER to “solve” the requirement, first posed by UNESCO in 2012 (D’Antoni 2013), but later taken up by the Hewlett Foundation (2013), of geographic mapping of OER initiatives, policies and other related entities. There are of course several such “solutions”, all with their strengths and weaknesses. The presentation will consider the decisions taken on technology, databases, mapping and user interface, looking both at the distribution and the collection aspects. For the means of both widespread distribution and collection the particular solution eventually decided on, after several...more Poster Session Wed, Apr 15 2015, 2:00pm – 3:00pm Why and how the OU provides free learning [739] with Patrina Law The Open Education Handbook [681] with Marieke Guy New mobile app to benefit FE student hairdressers [686] with Louise Egan Promise of OER – Opening Educational Practices in Scotland [736] with Ronald Macintyre, Anna Page, and Pete Cannell Connecting Learners to Open Education [728] with Steve Dawes, and Chris Rowell MOCCA (Multimedia Open Course on Cost Accounting) [704] with Anke Pfeiffer, and Roland Erben OER15 – Voice of the people [694] with Lizi Hesling, Matt Cawte, Russ Basford, and Thomas Bartlett On the training track towards Open Science...more |
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KEYNOTE: Martin Weller Wed, Apr 15 2015, 3:15pm – 4:15pm Download Martin Weller’s Slides more |
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Why and how the OU provides free learning [739] This poster will show how and why the OU provides free learning via its OpenLearn and OpenLearn Works platforms as well as other third party channels and how it continues to innovate to reach potential learners. The OU ensures it provides about 5% of its course materials as free open educational content every year. It does this because informal learning is part of the OU’s Royal Charter: “Advancement and dissemination of learning and knowledge … to promote the general wellbeing of the community” In the beginning the OU shared course materials via its broadcast partnership with the BBC, however in...more The Open Education Handbook [681] Where would you go if you wanted to know about the history of open education? What about if you were after a list of editor tools for remixing OERs? Or if you wanted to know more about open learning and practice? How about if you wanted to find out more about OERs and their use in the developing world? Or were considering what affect open education has on education? And what about if you were interested in open education data? There is a lot of information on open education and OERs strewn across the web but now it has been...more New mobile app to benefit FE student hairdressers [686] Introduction This poster will demonstrate how Hairdressing Training[1], an innovative Open online service provided by Mimas, part of the Digital resources division at Jisc has provided further positive impact on the user community through the provision of a new free and open mobile app. The development of the app by a mixed team at Mimas came about when it became apparent that the service could expand further by providing users with even easier routes to access content on the move – reaching and appealing to target audiences. Methods Through Jisc funding, the team set out to create an app that...more Promise of OER - Opening Educational Practices in Scotland [736] Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to open up new possibilities for widening access to education, however, the evidence to date shows this has not been achieved at any significant scale. Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) is a new three-year project funded by the Scottish Funding council (www.oepscotland.org). The project, led by the OU in Scotland, involves the whole Scottish Higher Education Sector. It will draw on and expand existing pockets of good practice and encourage stronger collaboration between Higher Education, Further Education, organisations and communities in Scotland to realise the benefits of OER. It will support develop...more Connecting Learners to Open Education [728] This poster will evidence the methods employed to connect learners and staff to the different types of training and open learning resources (OERs) provided by theUniversity. Beginning with an overview of the learning activities and training provided by the Learning Technology Team such as Best Practice Videos, Workshops, One-to-One sessionsand Online Training Courses, the poster will move on to show the methods used to promote these OER opportunities from offline media (Posters, QR Codes) to online channels of communication (Twitter, Team Blog). The poster will give real-world examples of these methods of engagement across the University campuses and how they can be...more MOCCA (Multimedia Open Course on Cost Accounting) [704] As the project starts in January 2015, we present the teaching concept, design & methods as “Work-In-Progress”. The aim of the project is to create a multimedia course on the topic of “cost accounting” to analyze, explore and evaluate the potential and the limitations of open learning resources. High withdrawal rates are a major issue for most MOOCs, i. e. the proportion of participants actually working through the complete course is relatively small. Although some approaches have been developed to address this issue (like establishing off-line learning groups, awarding certificates, etc.), in many cases these attempts did not prove to...more OER15 - Voice of the people [694] We would like to set up a stand next to a small area for recording interviews to camera using CADARN Learning Portal equipment. We would like to attempt to get conference goers to be interviewed throughout the first day with a series of scripted questions about the conference and OER production in their working life. We would then use a pre-prepared sequence to edit the interviews into. The resulting output video would be made available as an OER and could if desired be shown at some point on the second day. We would welcome specific questions from the organising comittee...more On the training track towards Open Science for European research [770] Training European researchers and professionals on Open Science is both a necessity and challenge, in particular to further facilitate the European Commission’s Open Access and Open Data policies as adopted for the Horizon2020 research framework and by many other research funders across Europe and world-wide. Finding good resources for teaching and training can however be challenging, despite or even because institutions and national initiatives have developed and delivered high quality training content which is typically scattered all over the place but so far not systematically shared with the community. The FOSTER project aims at identifying, enriching and providing training content...more An Open Mobile App to support Practice-Based Learning [671] Learners are increasingly using Mobile apps for general academic support (eg. TED), and sometimesfor tasks such as audio assessment and feedback (eg. ‘Open Voice’). Practice-basedlearners may additionally turn to Mobile apps to support their specific learningneeds and contexts, and there are several reported examples of this includingthe MOBILearn project (Lonsdale et al., 2004), and in specific fields such as medicine(for example, the iDoc project; Hardyman, 2013). Over the past year, a project at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD), partially funded by a HEA small grant, has involved the production of an app to support trainee science teachers...more Student Success Toolbox: Digital Readiness Tools for use in Supporting Flexible Learners [900] This poster reports on an externally funded research and development project currently in progress in the Republic of Ireland. The project seeks to address the problem of effective transitions and the foundations for student success during the initial stages of the study lifecycle with a specific focus on adult, undergraduate, flexible learners. Enhancing retention and completion rates of this group of flexible learners is a significant problem both globally and within the Irish context. Although the number of flexible learners in Ireland is relatively low in comparison to many other countries, around 17% of all undergraduates (HEA 2012), there are...more |